Kindergarten

What have you tried?

• I have incorperated more exploration and colaborative work in my classroom so that my students have the opportunity to share and explore.
• I have added more exploration of atlas's and treasure hunt activities.
• I have incorperated PBSkids.org in terms of playing games to reinforce learning skills.
• I have introduced a classroom blog that is a collaborative endeavor. We discuss in class possible topics for posting and what kind of responses to ask for that are most often based on a current area of study or discussion that has taken place. There is no pre-determined plan for the direction of the posts.
• Students are allowed to have a role in the direction of their own learning via the questions they ask and the interest they express. Giving over that amount of teacher-direction has been my biggest challenge.

What's Working? How do you know?

• Huge in terms of motivationfor learning.
• Quality of work has increased since I have been able to embed a safe place for creation where students are able to share their work with one another.
• Students are enthusiastically engaged in the blog and ask to see it everyday for new comments and sharing
• Students feel like they have control and have become great collaborators through lots of practice

What are your next steps?

• Flip camera project based on parts of speech
• Collaborative fourth grade project mimicing the Seasame Street show 'word on the street'
• Season's unit potentially with assisstance of blog.
• Would like to expand our blogging with other classrooms, share experiences
• Extend our all about me project into something more student-directed, include the blog if applicable